Wahh wahh I’ve seen comments like this before, I need jump into someone else’s mentions to get pissy about it for 20 hours, wahh. I wasn’t even replying to you dude, imagine how much time we both could have saved if you’d just downvoted my comment instead of appointing yourself arbiter of the FuckCars discourse.

The fuck are you talking about? Yeah, they don’t get to have the nuance; it’s not in the fucking post. It’s a pithy 50ish words about how they’re so much smarter than other people for not driving to the grocery store. I pointed out the reality is more nuanced than that for most people, and your whole response has been, “yeah, well, they probably know that, so why don’t just act like their response is nuanced?” To which the answer continues to be, “Because that’s not what they fucking said, are you high?”

Except there are places where that’s true. There are also people in places with the same mindset who buy trucks for twice the price of a reasonable hatchback…

Yeah, I never said this wasn’t true, but again, none of that is in the fucking post. The dude’s not making a nuanced point about people who live in walkable areas but buy large trucks over sensible hatchbacks. He’s making a sweeping statement about how people who don’t walk to the grocery store are idiots, but America has the walking score of a developing nation; if you live somewhere where you can walk to the grocery store, you’re breathing rarefied air, and calling other people stupid for driving is entitled.

Like, what are you so pissy about? That I was responding to the content of the post instead of the points you assume the 4Channer would make, but didn’t? OK buddy, in the future, I’ll try to infer what you presume the OP’s hidden beliefs are and tailor my comment to that. Seems reasonable.

Yeah, that would be a great point if the entire post wasn’t a 4Channer framing this as personal choices and not systemic ones. The dudes not talking about how the car industry destroyed railcars, he’s dunking on people who drive to the grocery store, and the implication is clearly, “everyone can and should do this,” which is bullshit.

Oh, this wasn’t even a right on red. The green light for cars was lined up with the walk sign for pedestrians going rhe same direction. In a situation like that, when a car with a green light needs to turn through the crosswalk, they are supposed to yield to any pedestrian crossing at that time, but apparently the people of Orlando have so much car entitlement that they don’t even slow down when a pedestrian is standing in the middle of the crosswalk trying to complete a legal crossing.

This is assuming you live in a walkable town or neighborhood. I remember a reddit post (can’t find it anymore) of a guy trying to walk less than 2 miles to an appointment in Orlando. He followed Google Maps directions down the shoulder of a highway that led to a dead-end, backtracked, tried again, and finally made almost all the way to his destination, which was on the opposite side of a 6-lane highway Google wanted him to cross.

I’ve only ever visited the theme parks in Orlando, but I experienced one intersection I had to share with cars. I spent every walk sign waiting for cars making a turn to yield. Even though I had the right of way, literally none of them did, until I finally had to run across the street because the cars at the red light, who could see I was 1/3 through the intersection, floored it the second their light turned green. Sure, fuck all of those car-brained drivers who refuse to yield to pedestrians, but also fuck that city for not fining drivers for shitty behavior, or at least changing their traffic lights so all cars have red lights when pedestrians have the walk sign.

Anyway, point is, personal choices are important, but they can’t overcome the systemic issues created by car culture without collective action. And Orlando sucks ass.

Sees someone articulating the problem of streaming platforms elevating low quality or toxic media in children’s feeds.

You (a genius): “This is bad parenting.”

Yeah, I was a teen in the early 2000s too. Most people still consumed most of their media through live TV. Anyway, you’re right, I should build a home server and start burning my own torrented DVDs. That’s the only reasonable solution to, “apps suggest crappy shows to my kid,” and it’s definitely the thing a parent of a toddler has the time to do.

Yeah, thanks, I’m not looking for notes.

Except they didn’t. They mostly watched live TV.

Paw Patrol is empty calories. It doesn’t teach emotional regulation like Daniel Tiger, or shapes and colors like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, or numbers, letters, and problem solving like Sesame Street. It’s not harmful like Cocomelon, and I’ve accepted that my son loves it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

Curating what your child consumes, both dietary and cultural, is the basic requirement raising a child.

Yeah, I curate what my child consumes, thanks, I just don’t have the time or energy to create a bespoke tablet of torrented kids shows to present him, or track down a circa-2002 portable DVD player and start a new physical media collection. If you’ve got that kind of free time, great, but I’ve just got to use the apps I’ve got, accept that he’s going to want to watch some shows that I find worthless, and make sure he doesn’t consume anything actively harmful.

I don’t give him a tablet, he only watches at home on TV (or a phone on very long car trips). I don’t know a toddler parent that has the time to download a curated media library for their kids, and even if you do have the time, things like that fall apart eventually. My wife and I managed to avoid most crap TV until we wound up in a hotel room with two dead phones and a fussy toddler, and that’s when we finally caved and put on Nick Jr. For a while, we managed to convince him that Paw Patrol was only available in hotels, but eventually he saw the thumbnail for it when we were trying to show him Dora the Explorer, and that beautiful lie finally died.

Holy shit, I did not know you could do that. That is going to be life changing.

App suggestions make it so hard to keep kids away from slop. I started out only letting my toddler watch PBS Kids programs and a few other educational programs, but then your kids start seeing suggestions for all sorts of shlock, and they want to see the show with the superhero kitties is (it’s called Super Kitties and it is garbage). God help you if you try to watch something on YouTube; every suggested video is either low-quality home movies of people playing with toys (which is like crack to toddlers or weird shit like this that absolutely shouldn’t be on YouTube Kids but often is anyway.

I would have labeled you guys, “Frasier.”

Yeah, seriously. At least call us, “Revolutionary War Reenactors,” or, “Cold NYC.” I’d even take, “Southern Quebec.” But lumping us in with Montana and the Dakotas? That’s some bullshit.

I don’t use A.I. because I’ve had nothing but negative interactions with A.I. Customer service bots that fail to give adequate responses, unhelpful and incorrect search result summaries, and, “art,” that looks like shit hasn’t made me want to sign up for ChatGPT or Gemini. For most people, this isn’t a moral stance, it’s just that the product isn’t worth paying for. Stop framing people that don’t use A.I. as luddites with an ax to grind just because tech bros spent billions on a product that isn’t good yet.

By the numbers, probably Mississippi. Lowest life expectancy, highest infant mortality rate, second highest poverty rate…being ranked 39th in education actually seems to be a bright spot for them.

That’s certainly how I feel about Parachutes. Solid little album, even if it’s not reinventing the wheel. I feel more mixed about A Rush of Blood to the Head. Some of their best tracks are on that album (The Scientist may be their best song), but a lot of it is forgettable, and Clocks just sucks, don’t know how that became a big single. I thought X&Y was pretty meh, and then I stopped listening.

I don’t know, maybe? When I was in high school the girls were all listening to emo. Once pop-punk went out of style (pretty much the minute Sk8ter Boi was released), most of the girls I knew pivoted towards Death Cab for Cutie or Dashboard Confessional. I was having a sad-boy period and other sad-boys I knew got me into Radiohead, Interpol, Coldplay (again, those first two albums), the Shins, and the Strokes.